Bovine_Avenger

With City Of Heroes now dying, it's of vital importance that all of us be able to fully interact with the information coming out; in particular the recent post on Announcements is inaccessible for replies for anyone who was caught on a subscription down-time, yet they'd desperately want to be able to ask questions about what it means for their final months. Even this thread is going to be in the wrong forum as I personally can't post in most of them. So please consider removing the interaction restrictions!

... So let's just say the one thing we always dreamed of doing in game, the thing that inspired us to play, and will keep us playing until the very end of November; and who knows, maybe the Devs will come join us for the final waltz.

For me, the Bovine Avenger, I dreamt of finally finding, and then making out with which ever fine heifer was making all those moo's in the Ski Chalet! I searched every year, often subbing just for that one month because I loved the atmoosphere, and the idea of Christmas cow'dles by the roaring fire so mooch, but alas... So come on Devs, make sure that zone is open on the last day, and perhaps one of you cow'd dress up and play hide and seek with us!

Hey all; I've popped briefly back into the game, and I'd like to get a few villain badges finally done, but the amount of players Villain side on Union now seems to be minute! So in desperation (and due to the fact I don't keep an account paid up for very long at all these days) I've turned to the boards...

What I'd like to try and arrange are the following, if anyone would like to help get a team going or has the missions for...

Mayhem Badges;

Steel Worker
Revolutionary
Talon Of Talos
Brickhouse

PvP Badges (Defeat Heros in RV):

Oppressor
Interrogator
Breakneck

Master of Recluse Strikeforce (I believe this one is the Weekly from Tuesday, so fingers crossed on this soon at least)

Master of Reichman Strikeforce (Barracuda)

Give me a day or two lead time to check the forums before suggesting a meet up please, and so I can arrange to be online where possible!

Greetings all,

Yes let the ice cold milk flow freely through the streets and stick to the buildings and in the hair of Paragon City's finest once more! In preparation for the forthcoming switch to free to play, I thought I would take out a months' subscription... I always had a lot of fun in this game, and although I'm not sure I'll pay for a constant sub when it does go live, I hope to have casual cow related fun with what was a fine cowmunity once more!

But how many of you remember me I wonder? It's been 546 days since I last played! And yet, I'm still in Sals Badgehunters! Thank you! And there's a fair few changes I've noticed too; I don't have Going Rogue yet, but what do I need to look out for?

The new graphic options are a bit daunting too, but I'll find the balance eventually... the most important things first though! To the Mission Architect and see if my moo'sterpiece is still around! And whether it can be extended to more udder insanity!

You really don't need a kin though; I'd forgotten all about alternate builds, but one quick swap to one of them and I managed to get Gold on all of them on all of my characters, and even managed on my Mastermind to hold the Union record for the normal slope for a day, at 16.31 seconds unbuffed. Just select Super Speed and Hurdle/Super Jump, and slot as many Single Origins into them and the basic Sprint as you can. SJ gives you the air control and the sliding speed on the flats, super speed helps correct mistakes and adds a little extra over all.

Aim the camera slightly downwards, so you can see the course ahead of you easier, and get the hang of turning EARLY; you want to slingshot around the course, not try and turn on each corner as you enter it. Here's a not-particularly good run, using just Super Jump on my main moo... notice I'm aiming just off the inner gate on every turn, so I'm aiming almost past it rather than through it;

http://www.mediafire.com/?xwing4xjjmq

You can also shave another second or more of the first drop gate by pointing 90 degrees to the left as you pass the gate on the very edge (the first left turn) instead of sliding further on. You can cut half a second off the drop after that by pointing hard left in mid air, and air controlling across to the gate, so you land and immediately slide towards the next gate.

Sadly I couldn't get a better run with the free FRAPS as the overhead it adds to my CPU meant I got micro second lags which threw me off the time. But the above is the basic idea... so hurry!

I normally have my sound in game entirely off, so I can play my own music on the computer instead... but every year, I have a little Christmas tradition now; I log in, turn it back on, and then sit on the ski slopes just to be re-acquainted with my old friend the disembodied moo... but I won't use the slopes until he says hello back!

'Tis the curse of mankind that each new generation has to relearn the lessons of it's forefathers... In this case, in this thread, I got as far as page 4 before I gave up and decided to just go straight to breaking out the history lesson.

The MMOs as you have experience them today are the product of nearly a decade of observation of human nature within the medium... but each MMO itself exists upon a certain point along the time line, from which due to the difficulty in overhauling the entire structure and starting again, few ever escape from.

It begins, at least for the first of those "M"s, with Ultima Online, launched in 1997; a game which started out with a complete free for all regarding player interaction. The designers assumed that those who wanted to play constructively would band together to protect each other from the self declared renegades... they thought their game would hold up a mirror to life, and "Good" would ultimately be dominant, whilst still allowing the rogues to exist. The problem was, in real life we can't just walk away and play a different life, we have to find a way to mitigate the worst excesses of human behaviour... In Britannia however, the "Dread Lords" basically controlled the entire world, as those who wanted to play constructively just walked away from the game; There's a basic article on the problem here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online

As a consequence, Origin/EA decided to divide the world into consensual, and non-consensual world wide PvP... with the result that approximately 80% of the population immediately bolted for the consensual world on the very first day, and never went back.

Most of the following MMOs took note of this, and designed their worlds with such a consensual/non-consensual division from the start, assuming they'd be able to maintain both player bases on the same hardware, but just a few lines of important toggle code apart. Everquest, and yes, our City of Heroes (launching without PvP at all, but with it as part of the later design plan) are part of this second wave. However, they all started to run into the same problem... the PvP parts of the world rapidly lost population, frustrating the PvPers who wanted to gank and kill people that simply weren't there any more, or were themselves off playing a dedicated PvP server, EvE Online, or Quake III Arena instead. The second wave solution was to try and create content which would draw the PvE players into the still existent PvP worlds. Bribing them in, basically. In the case of the continuing Ultima Online, it was Power Scrolls and unique loot from events over on the non-con world. In City of Heroes' case, it's unique badges, and the endlessly discussed Shivans; which I shall return to shortly...

But the reality of this approach just made things worse; The PvE'ers grew intensely frustrated trying to out-twitch the dedicated twitch gamers, who growing up in the culture of "anything to win" were often hacking to buggery on top of the different skill set and levels of skill. Nor did they like the other parts of PvP culture; the trash talking, the "pwning" rather than just winning... In Ultima Online, the result was that they very quickly lost interest in even trying to get to the PvP events, let alone wrest control of them from the PvPers. And as the Power Scrolls could be sold on the free for all player market, the ended up dominating the high end PvE market too. The result was an increasingly divided and angry player community; the PvE ers wanted the goodies, but couldn't get them, and the PvP players had them, but no one wanted to come to an increasingly unequal fight against them and have their inevitable teabagged-corpse.

City of Heroes, being a late Second Wave MMO tried to avoid this, originally by taking a unique "No Competition For Loot" approach, but also by when finally releasing PvP, leaving the hook to draw people over something personal, that they could eventually work towards no matter what, and not ever have taken from them... the Badges, and Shivans which were largely useless in PvP, but an enormous help in PvE. However, like most of the MMO industry, it had not yet sunk in that those kind of players hated the whole experience of PvP. They didn't want to spend however many hours doing something they hated, for a boost in efficiency doing something they actually liked.

This is why Third Wave MMOs have accepted an almost entirely self contained Consensual model, and what PvP there is has absolutely no negative qualities at all for your character. Witness the genre-conquering World Of Warcraft, but almost any MMO you can name that entered development let's say after 2004/5 or so; Tabula Rasa, Everquest II, Lord of The Rings (which interestingly, is trying a slightly different approach by letting PvPers be the actual E in PvE, but only as lowbie monsters I believe?) they all have the ability to step into PvP as you require, fight for bonuses that matter only to PvP (or have comparatively little use in PvE)... but if you don't want to ever PvP, you can just ignore it entirely, because there's nothing there you'd want compared to going PvE Raiding instead; the loot there was always maximized for that particular style of play instead. Even world PvP on PvP servers now allows you to bank and trade in peace, but almost all the best loot is Soulbound or similar, so you can't bend someone over the bank counter trying to corner the market on it either...

Now the old Dread Lords from a decade ago may howl about that, and that's where this thread has come from; It seems some in our Warzones haven't yet realised that they are at least 2 generations of MMO experience behind the times; but you can't criticize the new ideologies numbers from a business stand point; World Of Warcraft has around 11 million subscribers. People in general on both sides like the modern balance that's been found. Indeed, you could say City of Heroes is trying to emulate that formula somewhat, by bring in pure PvP character specs, and PvP recipe loot... widening the division between the worlds, but specializing them to taste.

And just because some people don't understand why this is, no business is going to go back nearly the entire lifetime of MMO experience and give you a second change to take a different path... not with so much money riding on their modern approach instead. Who'd want to be CoH after all, or even pre-Trammel UO when you can be today's World Of Warcraft? Indeed, every time you've killed someone who asked to share a Warzone in a mutually beneficial way in CoH, you've proven you aren't capable of following a different path by instantly reverting to being greedy and acting like it's your zone only; so they've forced a solution on you from above. A solution that works too.

That CoH's PvP balance has always been atrocious hasn't helped either, but that's another story...

You'd have to chain all 3 I suspect, so each one spawns after the previous, which would force the last one to literally be last... Sadly at the moment most of the really fun things we'd like to do isn't possible in the Mission Architect, so we have to find work arounds; in your case, to keep the mission fun, a fixed map, and using Front, Middle, Back spawning so the player doesn't have to go back and forth across the map looking for new hostages would be desirable...

Set her to Passive and then Betray, that might do what you require; alternatively, you can also when setting up the character, customize her power set and take the Mastermind summons out; however this will not allow her to summon them later either.

Also, it is possible to set an ambush for arrival at the door or rescue point, set the trigger as "Escort Name Is Completed". However, an Aggressive or Defensive character will summon the pets the moment they are rescued if not made Passive or denied them, and if you want the ambush to arrive quickly, you'll need to set it near the completion point, usually Front if it's the mission entrance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

The relevant part is the link at the bottom to specific "Internet Memes". You'll have come across them countless times, but few people know the etymology of the word itself

And now onto my main response;

Yes customs, but using the full Roman costume, and Roman rankings, and Roman themed biographies... because they're basically undead Romans, so they look naturally just like normal Romans but red; which is pretty boring to me personally, having already run the ITF to unlock the costume pieces myself and seen quite enough of normal human sized things in Roman costume.

And I reserve the right to only 5 stars for arcs that make me go "Wow! That's new!" or "Wow, what a piece of art!" and slapping wings on one Roman and giving them the flight power isn't enough... you could have taken it just a step further, hued them green instead of black skin/red clothes for lazy old undead, and called them Hawk Men instead... we could have had an arc where a Huge figure Brian Blessed in toga and beard comes swooping out of the sky! And who wouldn't be more excited by the prospect of that instead?

That's not saying it's not a good arc... but the adulation is in my opinion well out of proportion to it's actual merits.

Well, I just spent an idle evening playing through the 4 Guest arcs, and I have to say, my standards are probably way to high, but I found them somewhat disappointing.

WARNING... Possible spoilers ahead, so don't read on if you don't want to see some of the content discussed.

Both LOLBAT and Mission: Awesome suffer from serious overdoses of Telling Not Showing, describing down to the last detail every part of an encounter you've yet to even have. In LOLBAT the exemplar was the Scrabbler encounter, where the Clue takes you by the hand of both that mission, it's triggers, and, you'll later realise, the next and final mission too as it names the spawn trigger for that mission as well. In the Dynamic one it's right in the first mission, with the Kitten rescue... I did find really funny the eventual reveal within the target, but you're told about the Kitten I think it's at least 3 times before you find it, that it's in a box, why it's in a box, have you heard about that box...?

Perhaps that's due to a nervousness about this particular medium, but oddly these two arcs in particular failed on the other end of the scale as well, being completely light on supporting narrative. By that I mean, the trick to telling a good story is to be self contained with enough background detail to form the universal framework it takes to allow the viewer/reader to focus on the particular details of any smaller moment you present to them. In the examples above, the story went way too far in parts of the narrative, overloading you with story-slowing narrative; and yet for much of them both, it also leaves massive gaps which leave the reader going "Wait, what...?"

In LOLBAT the most obvious failure is with the whole concept of a Meme themed superhero. The whole essence of comedy, even the Meme, is surprise. Ceiling cat is watching you do something, but what is it? Something new, or a new way to present what he's always watching, and you'll laugh... But LOLBAT presents each meme dead straight as it's always been. It adds nothing to any of them, and indeed the plot seems to just be set up to shoe horn them in. Which for a comedy arc is fair enough; each mission runs with the theme of just one Meme. But there's also supposed to be the wider battle with LOLBAT and the Table going on, and that comes largely out of the blue... the worst offenders were the sudden kidnapping, even though LOLBAT is still of course your contact when you get back outside, and the Scrabbler's subplot, which in his final speeches, even HE doesn't seem to know what it's supposed to be about (Paragon city talking like LOLBAT... is he against it, or bringing it about so he can best everyone? And where did this plot come from anyway?).

For the Mission: Awesome one, the problem is more simple; it assumes you are not just a fan, but have memorized the entire cast of the Captain Dynamic videos. So an awful lot of times you find yourself looking at the screen and thinking "There's a joke there. But I have no idea what it is, or why it's funny, because I can't recall the video") It also tries to translate visual humour, one based in particular on facial expressions like the videos are, into a medium which just can't accommodate them. You can SEE what people think of Dynamic pressing their Awesome button in the videos; in the arc, you just are told about the button without knowing anything else about it.

The Great Face Off largely avoids this at first, because it's a simple rescue mission of someone you know to be villainous. And it's plot is self contained; now he's out he wants to earn money to pay off his henchmen. But again, it tails off towards the end, as the final mission gets into the jokes about Geoff and Captain Dynamic again, and yes, that awesome button again. Also it ends far too suddenly... they get to break into the cities computers and send spam, and then...? The end dialogue just thanks you for helping them do it, and that's it.

The Quest For Magic avoids this mostly, as it's much tighter plotted. It's a simple plot yes, and you see the "twist" coming from miles away as has already been mentioned. But it's main flaw is that it really doesn't understand the way the medium is experienced. To give two examples, as soon as you enter the first mission, there's a familiar friend... and I thought "Oh no, not HIM again." However he was quite cleverly removed from the scene straight away too, so the problem of pacing was deftly avoided. But here's the problem, he says what he's doing there very generally, but the background for that is in the Contacts Bio, which is the one piece of text most people don't read. They usually go Mission > Read Intro > Accept > Mission Map. Now I read the bio because I was going through them all with a fine tooth comb for inspiration for myself and critique for fellow writers out there.... but I suspect a fair people will be going "Wait... what?" at the very first door.
It occurs again on the second map; You find what is obviously the target, but it's not glowing. There's a trigger for it elsewhere, but it's never said what it is... and indeed I'm not sure I know having now completed the map; I THINK but am not sure it's one of the NPC targets on the map you have to drop. But if it is, there was no clue saying "You got the key to the glowie"; I just cleared out the back of the map, came back, and could now access it.

It has consistency problems too; In the Contact Bio, she's studying at P.I.S.I... but on the first mission introduction it's the P.I.S.A.I.

That goes for Face Off too.... everyone in the story is just a self-inflated office worker really, EXCEPT for Uncle Face, who appears to be an honest to god Mafioso. That really didn't fit the theme.

And for that matter, why on earth is Croc Pot so fanatical about healthy food, when he himself is a parody of hideously unhealthy pot noodles?

Everyone else has mentioned the minor spelling mistakes; but no one seems to have called the LOLBAT arc on what was some really atrocious grammar errors. Just what is trying to be said about the PHd reference in the Culinary Chef's biography? Croc Pot is just "Driven by" but nothing definitive. I also made a note of the line "behind for heroes to" but I can't recall offhand where it was sinfully placed now...

And again, maybe I'm just too picky, but I kind of expected after all this time that guest arcs would be crammed to the absolute last byte with content and customs; but the only one which felt "full" in any sense was The Quest For Magic.... Kurt'z arc really only comes down to a few missions with a tiny amount of highly repetitive custom creatures (2 visually identical cooks, repeated over 2 full Huge map missions... oh dear). and the Rooster Teeth ones used the same custom faction over 2 entire arcs, which were made worse by being absolutely the minimum size so details were hard to make out even where they differed, with a single main supporting pre-built faction per arc as I recall. All I did was blast through looking for the inevitable confrontation with the other half of the Rooster couple.

So ultimately, my votes were;

LOLBAT: 3/5, too short, and simple, and relies way too much on meme humour without applying it well. Desperately needed polishing in a lot of areas, textual tidying up, and adding more content.

Mission: Awesome: 3/5 Relied on far too much background knowledge, and on jokes that don't work in a textual medium. By the end I was sick of trying to fight the tiny, repetitive, and a little too strong nile-nonces. Face Off fight challenging but fair, as you had the Captain with you though.

The Great Face Off: 3/5 Started well, went downhill fast. Thought they could have used some of that spare space to at least shake up the final mission by putting in unique Firewalls, rather than running the joke into the ground by repetition. Captain fight was way too strong with his initial powers, had to come back after death as a L31 PB to beat him.

The Quest For Magic: 4/5 Much deeper content, and far tighter plotting. A fair few minor niggles, and I couldn't give a 5 to a plot that was so traditional overall and included such an obvious plot twist (and for that matter, generic mobs, they're all at base COH staple rehues; romans, vampires etc... still at least the vampires didn't uddering twinkle!), but by far I'd say the one with the most effort put into it, and it shows. And the characterisation of the Blobs was cute. But the final boss is STUPIDLY hard though;

"Dr. Marrow blasts you with their Blaze for 1115.73 points of fire damage!
Readying Solar Flare.
You continue to burn from the Blaze for 118.41 points of fire damage!"

And that was against a L32 Peacebringer (I levelled up running through these)... hmmm, that'd kill my fully PvE setted L50 moo moo too.

Bit of a shameless bump this one, but I've since found a way to lower the spawns to minion whilst keeping them spawning as a coherent group, so the final mission should be much easier now.

There's still a leeeetle -recharge, as we mustn't give up on the moo juice powers! But hopefully it should be completable by everyone now, whilst being perhaps a bit easy for L50s now; sadly I've not been able to find a perfect balance between the two extremes, but once more, I'd be interested in feedback for final, and beyond all reasonable attention and polishing!

As mentioned, you cannot currently merge extra missions into a Published Arc, but you can copy and paste them from one text document into another; However be aware that you need to copy and paste everything between and including the text lines...

"Startmission

...stuff...

Endmission"

... to get each mission, but that this will NOT include any custom characters on that mission, as they are stored at the end of the arc file. You'll need to reset them in the UI, or manually copy them in too to get them to work.

Sadly then you'll have to unpublish and republish the new version, losing votes and comments; I'd also add that, if you would prefer to copy text into the published version in order to avoid losing votes, try and write out rather than cutting and pasting all the text details... I've seen the text go wrong due to invisible and incorrect HTML tags being transferred when using C&P. Also bear in mind that any changes to your custom mobs and groups made to the local files will get uploaded when you hit Republish too, so make sure that you are happy with the state of all the supporting files first.

Bugged captive? What's the bug?

I've yet to try that arc myself, but I know when I was working on mine I thought I saw a bug... but it turns out that certain stealth powers have a legacy effect (Unbound Leap was mine) which comes back on for about 5 minutes after the power they are in has been deselected. So if you are getting to the captive, but they keep losing you the moment you step a few places away from them, it's not a bug, but simply the NPC can't see you. Try disabling your power sets that have either a basic stealth component (Super Speed say) or an IO slotted which procs one, and either wait 5 minutes, or try and get to them with plenty of grace time to allow one to switch off, and see if it still repeats...

If it's something else you're having problems with, there may be a work around, or it was a one time deal... but I'm not aware of anything which would definitely break escorts forever.

A bit off topic, but I had a thought today, if you ARE going to give us new Devs Choices, Dr Aeon... how about a mini review saying WHY you gave that award? Review threads have proven incredibly popular on the boards, and it might also give inspiration to people in their own future efforts, both playing and writing within the Architect system. Reviews pwease?!

Simple question, but I'm looking for tips here from people. The problem I have with my cow arc is this; I've got 3 custom mobs for the cow faction, with synchronizing powers between them... the idea being that each one is a weak link that anyone should be able to tackle with an opposing power set, but until 1 is knocked out the herd in general remains strong. They are all Lieutenants, because at that level you get 1 of each in every spawn.

Pre Issue 16, as they all had variants on Ice powers (Cold Milk/Ice Cream to personal taste!) but I'd taken some of the debuff powers off each one due to stacking -Recharge, and spent ages balancing them out with experience from my own different alts and the copious initial MA excitement of others who'd played it, so they'd be tough but fair... they then seemed to scale from there nicely for everyone. But I16 seems to have thrown that all out of the window now though; I've tweaked and tweaked again but the problem seems to be that with less powers than normal, they are ungodly strong against lowbie characters due to ramping up to compensate for this, and to prevent easy farming; but with Standard/Standard they're still rather tough against Low to mid, but turn out incredibly weak against L50s.

At present in my arc, I can beat them with both my L30 Peacebringer and my L50 blaster... but my first play, and feedback in nearly 3 months from a L29 Claw/Inv brute tells me he can't beat the final spawn at all, so I'm close to tearing my body hair out trying to understand how to get the balance right. How has everyone tackled this problem on their maps?

Also if there's a work around to force a mob to consist of at least 1 of each, so I can reduce some of them down to Minion instead, do let me know!

Kindly stop killing our scrappers on Master Of Statesman runs, you bearded cad!

Republishing from Local just puts it onto the MA server with a new Arc # but the same name; it doesn't over-write or touch in any way the previous release.

It will however change the custom characters files, so you can open your previously released arc, and just click "Republish" and it will import those changes for you. However if you changed anything in the "storyarc" file (mission settings, dialogue etc) you'll need to manually copy those changes into the published version to keep the associated Ratings and Play statistics I'm afraid.

Make sure to wait about 5 minutes after any saving of a Republished arc before editing it again, to ensure your changes actually stick and you aren't working on what the server sees as an older version; when you see the System Message "xxxx Is Republished" you can play the arc as it now is, but it's not always saved as such curiously.

I've managed to get a bit more testing in tonight, and moving that NPC forward so it's almost always the first or second NPC found seems to guarantee the Minion spawn... I tried running it with my own Mastermind and having all his Minions out didn't affect him, nor did rescuing the fleeing NPC and making sure he'd left the map before triggering the MM NPC... so I'm pretty sure it's the number of NPCs with you when you find them that confuses or nerfs them.

It just means I have to throw out the spawn balance I spent so long on tweaking to give a solid challenge, as he's a little too strong for the start of the map... Hard Patrols here we come again

Actually, there's a far more simple reason why EU players are going to be frustrated intensely by this competition; How many of you, where ever you are now, have got ANY plays of your arcs, no matter how good, over the last few months? Because if you aren't a Devs Choice, and on either the first few, or the last few (brand new) pages, with extreme figures either way for Played/Rated, people just aren't bothering any more. 4 stars and on page 100 is complete MA death; It's either all farms or the arcs that did well right at the start that are played now, and the madness of crowds has set in...

So. Here comes a competition to re-vitalize the attention paid to MA Arcs; Great! Actually, no it's not, because unless you're American, you can't even enter. Instead of giving us regular Dev Choices, like they actually promised, for everyone no matter where they live, or even following up on the thread for suggestions of quality we were given months ago, what we'll be getting is the best of the purely American arcs; Some of which may indeed be fantastic of course. But they'll be fantastic AND unfairly propelled to the top of the list again. It's going to lead to a form of MA Apartheid, and how anyone can honestly not see the huge discontent that's going to lead too is beyond me...

Now I'm not going to pretend free swag doesn't have it's appeal too... of course it does. But having already had my custom content published for free with other games too (Dawn Of War: Winter Assault when published in Poland, of all places, gave away one of my maps with the game as an online unlock) I'm entirely happy with giving the community something for nothing... just at least honestly acknowledge that it's appreciated for what it is. Criticise it where it's needed too, because that's where all self-improvement ultimately comes from. But don't just come out with "Sorry, you're not American, and we can't reward you, so you're not even in the running for recognition either."

Sadly, Support weren't much support;